by Amis, Martin
Observer, 1992
V. S. PRITCHETT'S CENTURY
He meets you at the turn in the stairs, with an expression of mild apology and embarrassment. It's as if he expects the visitor to be astonished — even scandalised — by how well he is looking these days. He seems to say as much. And then he goes ahead and says it: 'I know. Yes, well, I had all my serious illnesses in late middle age. And now I'm just stuck, I'm afraid.' He stands there intact and entire. Time and gravity have merely made him look sculpted-downwards, out of wood. You might find this face on the totem pole of an Amerindian tribe, long-vanished, perhaps, but widely famed for its pacifism and its compelling cosmogony.
Urged on by Lady Pritchett, who manages everything (she is prodigiously handsome and vigorous), we moved into the sitting-room. The house was autumnal in light and tang - unlike many a furnace of the elderly - and the Pritchetts were recovering, or regrouping, after a three-week visit from Eudora Welty, who journeyed there from Jackson, Mississippi. This sounded like a scoop, or a literary fantasy. And did these two veteran heavyweights talk obsessively about the art they had both mastered, that of the short story? 'No,' said Dorothy Pritchett. 'They talked about everything but. They talked about the Algonquin.' V.S.P. resignedly concurs. Everyone calls him V.S.P. And Dorothy sometimes calls him 'Vsp'.
For a while we gossipped in our turn, children, grandchildren, then the illnesses and deaths of people much younger than V.S.P., including the ex-occupant of the next-but-one house along Regents Park Terrace, A.J. Ayer. Frances Partridge has said that this is one of the great consternations of longevity: how the deaths of your own generation are followed by the deaths of the generation that came after, while you remain. 'It's all the wrong way round,' said V.S.P., who admits to finding the prospect of a tenth decade 'very shocking'. Dorothy brought coffee and joined us for the interview. She is not his eyes or his ears or his arms and his legs, all of which he still has. She is his memory. 'It's in patches,' he says, and gives his fizzy laugh.
It would gratify me to claim that V.S.P. and I go back a way. But it can't seem very far back to him. I was twenty-five. He was seventy-five, and considered to be 'marvellous' for his age even then. This is what impressed and assailed me throughout our meeting: a sense of depth. Depth of genius, certainly, but first of all depth of time. The interview was taking place in the year 1990; yet Pritchett grew up in a London still recovering from Jack the Ripper. The title of his first volume of autobiography, A Cab at the Door, fully evokes his origins: improvisation, hurried departure, resolute gentility. Those peripatetic Pritchetts may be leaving a lot of unpaid bills, but they are making their exit via the front door, not the back, and by cab, not on foot. And the cab, of course, is horse-drawn.
The young Victor emerged from 'a set of story tellers and moralists' (and savage eccentrics); his mother was a superexpressive illiterate, his father a clothes-horse and debt-dodger: and his milieu was that of 'trade', whose antiquity is best expressed by its humble grammar: 'short jobs in the drapery', 'put into the millinery', 'had lately become shopwalker in Daniels'. Pritchett was obliged to leave school early, for the usual reasons. During the Great War he worked in a leather factory in Bermondsey. Nicknamed 'the Professor' at home, where he had the status of 'a tolerated joke', he left for Paris at the age of nineteen. And so Pritchett lit out for a life of mental travel, in which he was free to reinvent himself.
He now sports the settled persona of the refined, understated, omnicultured mid-century litterateur, with his heavily qualified speech ('rather', 'quite', 'slightly') and his reserved yet caressing good manners. The bitternesses associated with poverty, class, early turbulence and the autodidact's solitude have long been assimilated. And this aura of twinkly equanimity, of aged saintliness, has in my view tended to neutralise his reputation — which, although considerable, is inadequate and misemphasised. V.S.P. is a grand old man; he is marvellous; may he live to be a hundred! His reputation is a haven of elegance, civility and quiet. But the essential Pritchett isn't like that at all. It is noisy, dangerous and beautifully awkward. It is visionary.
One of the many hats or masks that Pritchett wears is that of our senior literary critic. Here as elsewhere, though, he is a rampant instinctivist. Innocent of theory, espousing no tradition, his criticism is always doing all the don'ts: it is a mixture of generous connoisseurship and inspired psychology. Travel-writer, biographer, novelist, essayist, as happy with P.G. Wodehouse as with Antoine de Saint-Exupery -Pritchett looks protean, but really his genius is indivisible. He is a teller of stories.
'I think I can hit upon a writer's voice quite well,' he said. 'Then I find myself inventing a story about the book. Which is itself a story.'
'And your stories - they're the main thing, aren't they?'
'Oh, the stories to me are absolutely everything. I can't write novels. I have written novels, but they're not good. But the stories I think are sometimes good.'
'Yes, I think they're sometimes good, too.'
Naturally, one was falling in with the Pritchett style:
one was putting it mildly. But at that point I was only beginning to establish a final sense of bow good his stories are. Like many 'younger' readers (the word is used comparatively, and advisedly), I had picked up on Pritchett with the famous collections Blind Love (1969) and The Camberwell Beauty (1974). It quickly became clear to me that Pritchett was a writer of alarming clairvoyance: he had instant and unlimited access to the hearts and minds of so-called ordinary people. On the other hand there was a feeling that this genius was manageably minor, too febrile and amorphous, and somehow adrift in time and space: his was a shadowland of frumps and vamps, winking barmen, venomous valets, drunken matriarchs, venal quacks, lodgers, chamberpots, consumption and the smell of mouse.
This impression had survived the odd encounter with earlier stories in various Pritchett Selecteds and Collecteds and Readers and Best ofs. But now 1 was spending eight hours a day with The Complete Short Stories, and feeling the delightful pressure of its strength-in-depth. The book is hefty, practically cuboid (1,200 pages), and some reviewers have claimed difficulty in placing it on their laps. A better challenge would be to place it in world literature. In any case one is crushed by the weight of achievement. The volume, like the stories, comes up on you the other way: from a million little epiphanies Pritchett builds something vast. There may be half-a-dozen prose writers born in this century who could cobble together some kind of rival omnibus. But none of them is English.
A Pritchett story has two ways of announcing itself. The first way can only be described as thrillingly unpromising:
It was the evening of the Annual Dinner. More than two hundred accountants were at that hour changing into evening clothes, in the flats, villas and hotel rooms of a large, wet, Midland city.
— where wet has never worked so hard, and done so much. Or the second way (more characteristic of the earlier work), with a glare of poetic revelation:
The X-ray department of the hospital is reached by tepid corridors. A swing door admits the noises of the street and with a gulp swallows you and rejects them. You are cut off from the world. Stairways lead upwards to the regions of pain, six floors carefully labelled and distributed; yet, passing the open doors of laboratories, seeing instruments and retorts, smelling ether which excites the nostrils, the body begins to feel important. It is bringing its talent of pain to the total.
— where 'atmosphere' is suddenly condensed into a frightening truth. With a Pritchett story you are seldom going anywhere in a linear sense. Things happen; there are unitings and sunderings; deaths act as codas. You are not going anywhere but you are travelling mentally, and at speed. You are entering the writer's coherent version of reality.
It is a world lashed by weather and emotion. The city, in the blackout, where the siren sounds 'like all the dead cats of London restless beyond the grave'; or in fog, engulfed by 'moist horn-coloured vapour, with its core of weak pink or lilac light where the arc lamps hung. The cor
ners of buildings were smudged and broken off in the upper air and, in the lower, the fog was like a damp sand, the vapour of a million individual breaths.' The rural winter, where 'the roads are like slugs', the horses move off 'like hairy yokels', and the frost has 'its teeth fast in the ground': 'Winter in England has the colourless, steaming look of a fried-fish shop-window.' Or the sea, sometimes 'as quiet as the licking of a cat's tongue', or else forming 'a loose tottering wall, green, wind-torn, sun-shot and riotous . . . The lighthouse on the red spit eight miles across the bay seemed to be racing through the water like a periscope.'
Character is fixed by an adverb (the waiter comes forward, 'feebly averting his nose from the mess he was carrying on his dish'), by an adjective (' "I couldn't sleep — and when I can't sleep I scratch," said Margaret in her wronged voice'), or by the arrangement of epithets ('Frederick [the barman] stood upright, handsome, old, and stupid'). Like Auden, Pritchett loves to impact language, and run the cadences up the wrong way: 'He had a moustache of sweat, a hard, factory mouth, and blue, unwilling eyes.' Larger than life (and sometimes smaller, too), his creations never lose the delicacy of their lineaments. He is the heir of Dickens:
Rogers and Mr Pocock had come together not because of their minds or tastes, but because of their bodies. They were drawn will-lessly together by the magnetic force of their phenomenal obesities. There is a loneliness in fat. Atlas met Atlas, astonished to find each saddened by the burden of a world. Rogers was short and had that douce, pleading melancholy of the enormous. His little blue eyes, above the bumps of fat on his cheekbones, looked like sinking lights at sea; and he had the gentle and bewildered air of a man who watches himself daily getting uncontrollably and hopelessly fatter . . . Mr Pocock's pathos was fiery and bitter. A pair of stiffly inflated balloons seemed to have been placed, one under and one above Mr Pocock's waist-line, and the load forced his short legs apart on either side of the chair, like the splayed speckled legs of a frog ... At night they met like lovers. They were religious drinkers. Whisky was Mr Pocock's religion, beer was the faith of Rogers. An active faith ranges widely. After the public-houses of the village there were two or three on the main road. The headlights of cars howling through the dark to the coast picked out two balloons in coats and trousers, bouncing and blowing down the road. Dramas halted them. 'What's that, old boy?'
'Rabbit.'
'No, old boy, not a rabbit. It was a fox. I know a fox.'
'I reckon it was a stoat.'
The point became intricate under the stars.
Nevertheless it is Pritchett's women who define the true extent of his powers. For his sensibility is itself feminine, undissociated, like Eliot's Metaphysicals: in him, thought and feeling are congruent, not opposed. Pritchett's women loom magical and multiform. 'Mrs Tagg jostled her various selves together within her corsets and stared.' Or: 'She had several chins. The small chin shook like a cup in its saucer.' They 'swell with shame' and 'sit vast in nervous judgment'. Crucially, Pritchett is a poet of female tears. This lady has been drinking, and recalling a lost love: 'Mrs Forster's cheeks and neck fattened amorously as she mewed and quietly cried and held her handkerchief tight.' The warmth of the detail (the gripped hanky) is delightful; and yet it is also pointing beyond itself, to a larger mystery.
To something like this:
Gran's life was filled with guilt towards the living, whom she looked at slyly, and her tears were not tears of sorrow, but issued to conceal this guilt. She was guilty because she forgot the living and neglected them in her absorption with the dead.
And finally, at the end of the same story, to this:
And then [Aunt Gertrude] saw the crack in the mirror and tears came into her eyes, large tears like the pearl buttons in her blouse. To me they were not like the tears I had seen before, for her common tears were hardly personal, but a general oblation to the unexplainable coming and going of woe in the world.
From this coming and going, this woeful rhythm, the male writer - the male himself - has long been excluded, or exiled. But it is always available to Pritchett, and deeply informs his universality.
'I found people were telling stories to themselves without knowing it,' he said, when I asked him about his habit of inwardness, his telepathic entry into ordinary minds. 'It seemed to me that people were living a sort of small sermon that they believed in, but at the same time it was a fairy tale. Selfish desires, along with one or two highly suspect elevated thoughts. They secretly regard themselves as works of art, valuable in themselves.'
'But in life they are silent. Until you come along . . .' 'Yes. I do think it is a kind of duty to speak for them.' 'He just does it,' said Dorothy. 'That story about the antique dealer. People think he did months of research. But all he did was go into an antique shop in Wiltshire and spend five minutes buying a dining-room chair.'
Morally Pritchett's people inhabit a Biblical world (displaced and of course vulgarised), a world of shame, pride, guilt, temptation, and fear of ruin. They may be weak or sinful, but they are never judged; Pritchett never arranges for their conversion or punishment. 'I'd much sooner they go on unpunished. I think the incurable side of human nature is what appeals to me.' ('He's like that', said Dorothy,' — even about his own family. I can rage about them, but he never does.') Pritchett never judges, yet his style serves as a moral instrument. The slant of his prose and his comedy is a strict apportioner of guilt and innocence. He himself strikes you as innocent, and also terribly knowing.
Seen as a writing life, The Complete Short Stories describes the arc of ascension and inevitable decline. After the long crescendo, the long decrescendo. Formal artistry continues, but what it has to handle becomes less volatile. Now the cataract has become an unregarded mountain stream. It appears to be his only sadness.
'I haven't done anything for - how long? Several weeks?'
Dorothy: 'Several months. He's longing to write another short story.'
'I have jots of things which I think are no good. Start always again. Have another go at it ... As one gets older one becomes very boring and longwinded to oneself. One's thoughts are longwinded, whereas before they were really rather nice and agitated. The story is a form of travel. As I go across the page my pen is travelling. Travelling through minds or situations which reveal their strangeness to you. Old age kills travel. Things don't come suddenly to you. You're mainly protecting yourself. Stories come up on you almost by accident. And now one tends to live a life in which there are no accidents . . . It's nothing to do with that really. It's just being older.'
Powers fail. But Pritchett's presence is still a testing one. I came away from Regents Park Terrace feeling heartened and relieved, as if after a psychiatric check-up; I had survived the stare of the benign basilisk. The great writers do something specific to their readers. They heighten and transfigure the world you see, for ever: 'like the clot of a spirit level to be steadily carried'. Parkway and Camden Town were busy and wet, entirely everyday in their anti-travel of errands and hurry. But Pritchett was filling these streets for me with theatre. He makes the world strange, humorous and dreadful, appallingly overpopulated with passions and fears. The queue at the bus-stop suddenly resembled the crowd at a stage door, their faces no longer vacant but full of fever and cunning. 'No two stories' - meaning no two people -'are quite alike,' he had said. And 'I'm always anxious to speak the truth, you know.'
From 'The Upright Man', written sixty years ago:
Clerks flung their lives about and committed follies. One married to a voracious wife drank on Thursdays a glass of stout. One who copied weighing slips gave imitations of the voice of the cashier. One who was bald put his hand down the blouse of his secretary and was slapped in the face. One would absent himself for twenty minutes in the morning to read the newspaper in the lavatory. One going deaf turned to an Oriental religion. One made use of the office telephone to communicate with a bookmaker. One told the Port of London Authority of an error in demurrage; it was his own. One staying after six lit his
pipe.
And then later, after the War:
One who had come to suspect Divine Justice took to games of chance. One who was bald consummated love with a telephone operator and was presented with a clock on his marriage; one saddened by an adding machine took drugs which gave him visions; one moved into a town whose train service had been electrified; one who could imitate the voice of the cashier played in an orchestra; one sold his house at a profit; a typist given to the circulation of religious pamphlets had a week's leave to serve on a jury; many grew flowers and had newborn children.
Independent on Sunday, 1990
